Jorge's right re: ni

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>]

Hi,

After reading Jorge's last message and staring at the wall scratching
myself for a while, I finally see his point, and it seems like an
important one.  The thing is, it's a question of sumti raising, which for
some reason I find very difficult to think about clearly; my mind is too
eager to let levels of abstraction slide around willy nilly.  Unless
everyone's sick of the topic, I'd like to re-explain it in a way that
makes more sense to me:

Here's how I convinced myself he's right:

Let's talk about non-abstracted sumti first.  If I were to say

   mi nelci le ckule be fo le mi bruna
   I like the school with-attendee my brother
   I like the school my brother goes to

The sentence means that I like the school, but it does not imply that
I like the fact that my brother attends it.  Maybe he's a ne'er-do-well
and I'm afraid he'll damage the reputation of the school.  If I wanted
to say that I liked the fact he was going there, I'd instead have to use
the abstractor {nu}, and say:

   mi nelci lenu le ckule cu ckule fo le mi bruna
   I'm glad that the school is the school with-attendee my brother
   I'm glad my brother goes to the school

This says I like the fact, but does *not* say I like the school.  Again,
maybe it's a cruddy school and he's a cruddy brother and they deserve each
other.  (purely hypothetical; my brother's banli)

By analogy with this example, I claim that whenever you have a simple
sumti with arguments connected by {be}, the main bridi doesn't claim
anything about those {be} arguments, except that they help identify
the one place that's priviledged by being connected to the {le} gadri.
This might seem pedantic and obvious, but consider a trickier example:

   mi nelci le se skari be le do kerfa
   I like the color that your hair is

This should *not* imply that I like the fact that your hair is that
color.  Mabye it's a beautiful shade of kelly green and I'm your
conservative parent.  To say I like the fact that your hair is that
color, I'd have to use {nu} as before

   mi nelci lenu le se skari cu se skari le do kerfa
   I'm glad that that color is the color of your hair

(and then I wouldn't be saying I liked the color in itself anymore --
maybe you've got a beautiful head of red hair, but I'd never paint my walls
quite that shade.)

This is a really tricky point for me to grasp, and I can't imagine
how I'll ever learn to keep it straight when using Lojban outside of
examples like these.


But on to {ni}: I think the reference grammar is inconsistent, and
confuses the two types of reference to numbers.  If you want to refer to a
number as a simple mathematical object, you should use a BAI modal,
probably {sela'u}.  If you want to talk about the fact that a particular
number applies, you should use {ni}

In the ref grammar, the first two examples (5.1, 5.2) are bare {le ni}
sumti out of context, and the English glosses are necessarily ambiguous,
so they might be right.

Example 5.3 has got to be wrong.

   li pa vu'u mo'e leni le pixra cu blanu
   The number one minus how blue the picture is.

This works just fine in English, but in Lojban we can't go subtracting
from one the matter of how much blueness a picture has.  The example
should read:

   li pa vu'u mo'e le jai sela'u le pixra cu blanu
   1 minus the quantity by which the picture is blue.

I think Jorge will still quibble over {sela'u} can force blanu to cough up
a quantity for something that isn't necessary blue, but at least we've got
the sumti-raising problem solved.

The final example, 5.5, seems fine to me:

   le pixra cu cenba le ni ce'u blanu
   The picture varies in the amount of blueness


I recognize that we can't and shouldn't try to change the ref grammar at
this late date, but I think {ni} is useful as I've described it, and I
think my lojban usage can be consistent with the grammar if I avoid usages
like example 5.3.

I also think the same analysis could probably be applied to {jei}, and
that in fact the school and hair color examples would be more correct
with {jei} instead of {nu}.  But I didn't want to confuse things with
another disputed abstractor.

Thanks for listening.  I hope I haven't bored everyone to death.

co'o mi'e kris